In most modern postal facilities, major steps have been taken toward mechanization (e.g., automation) of the delivery of mail, packages and other items. These machines and technologies include, amongst others, letter sorters, automatic address readers, parcel sorters, advanced tray conveyors, flat sorters, letter mail coding and stamp-tagging techniques and the like. As a result of these developments, postal facilities have become quite automated over the years, considerably reducing overhead costs.
However, large volume mailers such as publishers are still saddled with a long and involved process in their facilities that involve substantial labor to deliver flats (i.e., magazines, flyers, books, and the like) in a cost efficient manner. First, mail must be sorted to certain depths in order to obtain reduced postal rates, and this sorting process can involve many special considerations such as sorting by size and destination. But, the overhead involved with preparing large amounts of flats for mailing is often related to the rates that the mailer is attempting to achieve, amongst other considerations.
To complicate matters, there are a host of mailing rates and sorting possibilities that might affect the postal rates. By way of illustration, if there is a large amount of mail to one particular destination neighborhood, the mailer can pre-sort mail in a bundle for the neighborhood mail carrier, even sorting to a depth matching the sequence of the delivery route. This is among the lowest cost rates available. If the mailer actually delivers the sorted bundles to the appropriate neighborhood post office, the rates are even better. Thus, mailers can elect to sort the mail or flats to various levels of granularity, or depth, depending on the costs and volumes involved.
The overhead to perform these types of sorting and packaging with accuracy and with flexibility is very labor intensive particularly when various shipping bundle sizes result or different types or sources of mail are bundled at the same facility. More specifically, flats mail of a single type are typically bound together to facilitate shipping and handling. However, many facilities publish different types of flats mail, with varying bundle sizes. In current processes, for example, bundles are normally made-up by the printer/mailer by combining the flat mail pieces as they serially come off a single production line. Although the United States Postal Service (USPS) recently updated guidelines allowing co-mailing of different types of mailings to reduce overall costs and increase efficiencies, the technology currently used does not have the ability to combine the outputs of separate production lines or mail pieces printed at different times in order to mix different types of mailings. This leads to smaller sized bundles which, in turn, increase postal costs for such mailings.
Also, once the bundles are made, they are typically stacked on pallets for mass transport to mail facilities. Because of the potential smaller bundle sizes of a single type of product, the pallets can be of unpredictable sizes with inconsistent packing arrangements that may not be easy to unpack at the postal facilities. Little standardization of the bundling and palletization currently exist.
The invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems as set forth above.